Qualcomm Announces 'Game Command' App

There's a growing consensus that Google's Android Market is broken, especially on tablets. While the open Android OS has allowed a tremendous amount of creativity to bloom, it's often terribly hard for average users to find apps that will work well on their specific devices.

"If we look at Android Market, there's hundreds of games. How do we get discovery? It's just so hard to find out which games are optimized," said Raj Talluri, vice president of product management for Qualcomm's chipset division.

The answer, Talluri says, is Game Command. The huge chipmaker's new Game Command app, which will be available next January, will let phone and tablet owners running Qualcomm chips see an easy-to-sort list of great games that are guaranteed to show off their devices' hardware.

Game Command refines the ideas first seen in Qualcomm's Snapdragon Game Pack back in June. But while the Snapdragon Game Pack has a broader array of games, Game Command can find the ones specifically optimized for a single device, Talluri said.

Nvidia and Samsung are also trying to patch up the Market's failures. Nvidia's Tegra Zone app to supplement Android's storefront and spotlight games that work well on Tegra 2-powered phones and tablets. Samsung recently followed up with the new Samsung Apps on its Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus; like Tegra Zone, it's not a whole new store but rather a filter for the overwhelming variety in the Android Market.

Qualcomm's task is a little tougher than Nvidia's, though. While Nvidia, as of the end of this year, will only have two chipsets in the market (Tegra 2 and Tegra 3), Qualcomm has a much broader array of chips and capabilities.

So Game Command will have two kinds of listings. Many games will just be guaranteed to run, but they may not be optimized for your specific chipset. Games marked as "enhanced" or "featured," on the other hand, will take advantage of special hardware.

"It will run on all Snapdragons, anything that's branded Snapdragon," Talluri said. "It's smart enough to pull out the games that are actually optimized for that particular device."

Qualcomm also announced three exclusive games for its phones: "The Ball," "Fight Game Heroes," and Galaga.

I got a little while to check out Game Command and found it to be the rough sketch of a very good idea. The app launches into a customizable list of all the games on your device. If you flip over to a "featured" pane, you'll get profiles of individual games along with an indicator of whether the game is enhanced for your device or not. A "news" pane is a simple RSS reader for some popular gaming blogs.

The sample HTC Jetstream tablet I tried Game Command on had a mix of optimized and un-optimized games. Desert Winds is Qualcomm's showpiece game for its latest hardware, a beautiful first-person combat game set in a desert. It looked gorgeous on the Jetstream. But boat game Wave Blazer didn't look quite so great; while it ran, thegraphics were clearly scaled up from a much lower resolution.

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts of the daily PCMag Live Web show and speaks frequently in mass media on cell-phone-related issues. His commentary has appeared on ABC, the BBC, the CBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and in newspapers from San Antonio, Texas to Edmonton, Alberta.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer, having contributed...
More »